I would like to record a weekly two hour radio show onto my computer.

December 7, 2004 8:30 PM

I would like to record a weekly two hour radio show onto my computer. (More Inside)

I can easily connect a radio to the audio in on my sound card. What would be a good program to record the file? What would be a good file type to use? How big a file size can I expect each week?

posted by Apoch to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Goldwave is free, iirc, and should do the trick.

If you're recording to wav or aif (which is what I'd do), filesize should simply be channels * samplerate * bit depth, so for stereo 44.1kHz 16 bit (likely the default setting for your soundcard), you're looking at 1,411,200 bits per second (about 172k). That's about 1.2Gb for the two hours. Of course, you could then compress with mp3, flac, ogg or whatever after you've finished the recording.
posted by pompomtom at 8:45 PM on December 7, 2004

Prairie Home Companion? Me too.
posted by fatllama at 9:45 PM on December 7, 2004

Response by poster: American Routes They don't sell tapes and I don't get to listen every week.
posted by Apoch at 9:48 PM on December 7, 2004

I use axife fm. It's payware, and requires a radio card in your PC, but it works very well, and you don't have to remember to keep the radio plugged in and powered on - it does scheduled recordings.

To do scheduled recordings with just the line-in method, I had good luck with Messer (free) and Total Recorder (not free).

After meticulously arriving at my own radio recording setup, I remember reading that griffin had released a radio / recording scheduler gizmo. Here it is: Radioshark.

Good luck!
posted by adamkempa at 9:59 PM on December 7, 2004

Well, if you were using some sort of *nix (you don't mention what OS you are running) I would suggest using wavr (standard in debian based distros at least, not sure about others), a small bash script to change the filename to something intelligent like $DATE - $TIME - Show. Set it up a cron job for it.

Windows, have no idea.

Filesize, pretty big for a wav. But, if you transcode the wav file to mp3 (again, lame would be a good choice if you are on a *nix) the situation would improve.
posted by pemdasi at 12:18 AM on December 8, 2004

If you have broadband, you could find a station that has a reasonably high quality MP3 stream, and schedule Streamripper to record it to your hard drive that way.
posted by ascullion at 1:08 AM on December 8, 2004

streamripper works. There is a non-scheduleable thing called

"opD2d" that also works (windows). I'm actually breaking down and buying audio hijack for os x because it will shut itself off when it hears extended silence. Tragically, many of my acquaintances do not come with that functionality pre-installed.
posted by mecran01 at 6:45 AM on December 8, 2004